Friday, January 20, 2012

Permission to wed

TLOML has just applied for his marriage visa. Johnny Foreigners need marriage visas if they are to be allowed to marry one of Her Majesty the Queen's loyal subjects. Quite right too.

The marriage visa form is about a hundred pages long and most of the umpteen questions they ask appear to be aimed at mail order spouses. 'Have you met your future spouse?' and 'How many times?' made us chuckle. TLOML's answer to 'Where is your future spouse at the present time?' was 'Looking over my shoulder.' Not sure we needed to be that specific, but it's the truth at least.

Questions like 'How many bedrooms does the house you are moving into have? How many other rooms? How people live there curently? How many people will you move in with?' abound too. I suppose that's how they spot the poor souls who want to squeeze nine relatives into a bedsit.

There isn't a box you can tick to say 'we're just two engaged people, and one of us happens to be a bit foreign'. I mean, we're not getting married for the visa. We're getting the visa so we can get married. So he filled in the forms and tried not to snigger as he did so.

A couple of days later the forms got returned. It seems the passport photo TLOML had enclosed was not up to scratch and we needed to send a different one.

TLOML was out of town so I was in charge of this simple job. Reprinting the photo meant operating his Mac, and changing our printer settings, and feeding photo paper in, which I know isn't that complicated but it was a bit beyond me. Then I had to buy a Money Order to pay the visa people for the extra postage costs they had to incur in returning the unprocessed visa form to us, which in itself meant googling 'what is a money order?' and then standing in line at the post office. Finally I had to FedEx the thing, which required me to print a FedEx label out, which kept printing out weird 'cos of the new photo settings, and then finding a FedEx envelope with an address label pouch on it, which again, is not that complicated but was just beyond my capabilities.

The whole operation took about half a day. And several increasingly tense calls to TLOML for guidance in printer settings, where the photo paper is kept, how the FedEx thing works etc etc. I must say, I don't know how anyone with a full time job and poor internet access can apply for the visa at all. Which presumably is part of the point. Pause to reflect... if I had to apply for a British visa for myself, would I meet the standard? I almost failed at the first hurdle, putting the damn form in the post.

Anyway, it's done now and our fate is in the hands of the good people at the British Consulate. Keep your fingers crossed TLOML gets the visa. For one thing, we've put a deposit down on the venue, and I'd hate to lose it. And since he truly is The Love of My Life I don't think I'll find another groom who's even half as good.

Meanwhile, TLOML has announced to me he would like to be a 'non dom'. Grr. (American readers - non-doms are evil Tory taxdodging jet set types, who avoid paying tax by claiming they are not 'domiciled' in England). In my (left wing, tax-loving) mind that's almost grounds for divorce. But I suppose that's a bit premature...

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Transplanted to Los Angeles and then New York by The Love Of My Life (we’ll call him TLOML) - till I dragged him back to Britain. Writing about the cultural chasm, and our return to LA as a family of 3.